Re: Upgrading NetBSD in-place in a clean way

[Nicolas Joly <njoly%pasteur.fr@localhost>]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 01:43:36PM +0100, Pierre-Philipp Braun wrote:
> Stefano Marinelli wrote:
> >Ok, let's suppose I want to upgrade a NetBSD machine without rebooting 
> >with sysinst and without having the possibility to use the build.sh script 
> >with the sources.
> >I'd do something like that:
> >1) download the daily (stable, for example) binaries (for example from 
> >http://nyftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-1/)
> >2) Untar all the sets on the file system I want to update
> >3) run etcupdate
> >4) reboot
> 
> for a major upgrade you need to reboot just after you updated the 
> kernel, the the userland.  I'm happy with etcupdate only (no 
> postinstall) and keeping a kind-of-system wide .profile and .kshrc on / 
> for users to link against it.
> 
> >Tried that in a test virtual machine and seems to work. But there's a 
> >problem: what if something has been removed? Untarring the sets doesn't 
> >remove the (stale) old files, while the etcupdate just deals with the 
> >config and startup files.
> >Is there a cleaner way to do it?
> 
> do you mean the old files of userland, not only /etc ?  I'm afraid 
> there's no solution for that yet.

That's postinstall(8) job ... especially the obsolete item.

Default set of items (to apply if no items are provided by user):
  Item          Description
  ----          -----------
  obsolete      remove obsolete file sets and minor libraries

-- 
Nicolas Joly

Biological Software and Databanks.
Institut Pasteur, Paris.